Millennial Blues

I wasn't particularly happy when I was fifty. I know because I've been working my way through all my poems, revising where necessary, and I'm currently thirty years in, dealing with the ones I produced around the millennium and finding that the tone has shifted and a lot of them feel defeated, jaded and touched with a kind of flippant cynicism that I no longer find amusing. Once in a while, there's an unguarded spurt of anger or pain. I'll be glad when I've pushed and pruned my way through this particular thicket and the work becomes sunnier...